Burrowing in for the Long Winter III (The Fallout)

Scenius has its limitations. An understanding of these limitations, and of the strategies that artists use to overcome them, is necessary if we want to understand the final stage of our path.

To this end, the following observation from Blissblogger provides a helpful starting point (with scenes rather than “genres" in mind):

We tend to regard genres as organic or biological entities - as a person (growing through the ages of man: infancy, childhood, adolescence etc etc) or as an ecosystem (evolving, mutating, expanding, assimilating, withering)

Does this make sense - seeing social constructions and assemblages as living, quasi-natural systems? It seems irresistible to think of them in those terms but I wonder if there's any reality to it.

But going with that conception of a sound or subculture as a living, growing thing - that leads to the melancholy thought: when a genre achieves adulthood (formative phase completed, influences shaken off) it enters its prime, but that can only ever be a brief moment before the next step, the onset of decline and senescence.

With genres, that doesn't take the form of the musical equivalent of arthritis or Alzheimer's, but genres as they age out do mimic one characteristic of the aging mind, which is inflexibility and an inability to generate fresh perceptions or thoughts.

The difficulty Blissblogger identifies here is that the energy that an ecology of talent generates is fragile and unsustainable in the long term. Eventually it dies down. Instead of producing exciting art, the scene increasingly produces uninspired and rigidly formulaic art. Mutual reinforcement and likemindedness—the very features that allowed the scene to flourish in the first place—ossify into orthodoxy.

This ossification is often accompanied by a newfound sense of disillusionment, the departure of an “anything is possible” spirit formerly in the air. I’m not sure which comes first, loss of creative optimism or stagnation on a formal level. But regardless, the whole situation forces a choice: either accept the ossification or get out.

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One artist who saw the writing on the wall and took the second option was Delia Derbyshire. Later in life, she recounted how “something serious happened around ’72, ’73, ’74: the world went out of tune with itself and the BBC went out of tune with itself”. The shift that she felt in her surroundings prompted Derbyshire to leave the Radiophonic Workshop, and more broadly, Swinging London—a creative environment in which she had thrived for over a decade, and which her partner described as being “[Delia’s] heaven”. Derbyshire recognized how valuable her stay had been—but looked around and concluded that it would not continue to be so. There comes a point when if you want to keep developing creatively, you have leave the scenius stage behind.

But although abandoning ship can be a wise course of action, it doesn’t always work out the way you'd hope. This was likely the case for Derbyshire. She spent the second half of her life writing music but never, in all that time, published anything. Practically none of her work past ’75 amounted to fully realized music. That such a fate befell someone who was extremely driven and imaginative is telling. Leave the scene as it begins ossifying, and you can still easily fall into a kind of stasis of your own. It’s unlikely that an organism will thrive once removed from the ecosystem that nourishes it.

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Yet there’s another way to escape a scene that’s in decline: simply move from your current scene to a different scene that’s going strong. If the scenius stage amounts to a sort of apprenticeship or schooling, then this tact is transferring to a different school (whereas the previous course of action is essentially dropping out). Music critics absolutely love when artists do this. Rock musicians and pop stars who can gracefully maneuver from one ecology of talent to the next are held on perhaps the highest pedestal by critics. And their veneration of this approach makes some sense. It allows you to capitalize on the advantages of being involved in a scene without suffering the drawbacks.

But as great as it looks on paper, this solution has its limits in practice. The problem is that you can only transfer schools so many times before you age out. Hardly anyone has the requisite mental flexibility—no, malleability—to spend an entire lifetime jumping from one scene to another. Each scene comes with its own set of shared values, reference points, and experiences. So each jump requires you to effectively replace one set with another in your mind. Our brains are wired to build upon existing knowledge, yet with this “transfer student” approach, you are perpetually starting over. (Even if, as a person, you remember your past experiences in other scenes, as a creator you must forget them.) At best, most artists have maybe one or two successful “scene transfers” in them. If they do try again, they most likely won’t land the jump. Which is to say that they will fail to tap into the shared energy generated by the new scene. For example, take one of popular music's most adept scene-jumpers: David Bowie. Droid describes Bowie’s attempt to harness the energy of jungle in the 90s as follows:

The reason I think this is instructive in terms of the earthling disaster is that its indicative of Bowie's inclination to take the easy path in his later career. His success was built upon a highly astute personnel choices. Ronson, Vandross, Eno, Rodgers and (perhaps most brilliantly) Davis, Alomar and Murray. After Let's Dance this sense seems to dissolve. he works with whoever is convenient or at hand. You would think that the man who pulled together so many brilliant bands would have the nous to do the same when approaching an occult genre like jungle... throw Rob Haigh, Photek or 4Hero a fat cheque - fuck it, even get Nookie or something, at least find someone who knows what they're doing instead of some random rock producer who cant cut up a break to save his life. I mean, Mark Plati... who the fuck was Mark Plati? So yeah, he couldve made a decent stab at a jungle LP if he hadn't been so lazy and he could have come to proper jungle nights full of manglers instead of some corporate astroturffed Bono shite, and I could've been at that secret gig in 97.

Droid sees Bowie’s problem as laziness, yet I think we can also interpret his problem as a reluctance or inability to truly immerse himself in the scene he had his sights on. He was unable to adopt the junglist mindset enough to recognize who was "real" and who was not, i.e. who was channeling the genre's true creative potential and who was not. In the past, Bowie had been more discerning—but with this attempt, he overextended himself. A revealing case study for scene-jumping, I think. Ultimately this solution simply inverts the problem: instead of the power of scenius eventually failing you, you eventually fail to channel it.

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There is also a third option: loyalty. You don’t need to change course when the things start slowing down. You can freely accept this depletion of energy. You can conclude that where you have ended up must be the best of all possible worlds. How could the scene be wrong? I already essentially covered this approach by complaining about Plaid’s attitude (as expressed in a recent interview) here. When they say that they are proud to make (almost) the same album over and over, and that, currently, "revolutionary sounds . . . [are] just not possible", Plaid exemplify the mindset I'm talking about. The advantage of this approach is that it’s less likely to result in outright failure than the previous two. If you stay the course, you'll neither lose focus nor take an overt misstep.

This disadvantage is that, as I argued in the linked post, no one ever seems to make their best album 25 years into the refinement process. It's exceedingly likely that they'll make their, I don't know, seventh best album, but exceedingly unlikely that they'll outdo their previous work in any meaningful sense. Which raises the question... why even continue? FFS, I want to hear the best music ever, not music that's just like something else I heard years ago, except not quite as good.

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But wait. Surely none of the transitional approaches we've identified lead to the master's study. So what was the point of discussing them?

For one, I just find them really interesting in their own right.

I also wanted to convey is that the transition from scenius to master's study is dangerous. It's the spot where most artists (including many really amazing ones) take a wrong turn. But if you manage not to, you might find that the best is yet to come.

And finally, we will see that the master's study has something in common with each of these "wrong" approaches.

Burrowing in for the Long Winter II (Scenius)

You can't stay in solitude forever. Come to think of it, I discussed this with Version once. We were trying to think of musicians who had developed in total isolation from any relevant peer community and couldn't come up with any. Even the iconoclasts and rugged individualists inevitably find their way to some kind of artistic social sphere (however niche it may be). For a time, they have allies, mentors, and competitors. So before you get to occupy the master’s study, you have to spend some time away from your bedroom and actually... go outside. At least figuratively.

Some affirmation of this comes in Brian Eno's concept of scenius. He describes it as follows:

I was an art student and, like all art students, I was encouraged to believe that there were a few great figures like Picasso and Kandinsky, Rembrandt and Giotto and so on who sort-of appeared out of nowhere and produced artistic revolution. 

As I looked at art more and more, I discovered that that wasn’t really a true picture.

What really happened was that there was sometimes very fertile scenes involving lots and lots of people – some of them artists, some of them collectors, some of them curators, thinkers, theorists, people who were fashionable and knew what the hip things were – all sorts of people who created a kind of ecology of talent. And out of that ecology arose some wonderful work. 

The period that I was particularly interested in, ’round about the Russian revolution, shows this extremely well. So I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent. 

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.

Interestingly, his description doesn't completely match how we often use the term. On Dissensus, we tend to set scenius in opposition to genius not just conceptually, but in terms of membership. We categorize our favorite musicians as either individualistic geniuses OR the products of a collective scenius. But that's not exactly what Eno is saying. As he describes it, the two concepts are closely entwined. Scenius functions as a sort of launch pad that allows what we ordinarily call "genius" to get off the ground.

We can integrate this idea into our envisioned path. Besides the two stages described in the previous post, there has to be a brush with scenius. So we have the "teenage bedroom" stage, which is about letting your mind wonder, and the "master's study" stage, which is about realizing your vision--and now an additional "scenius" stage.

But what is this stage "about"? I would contend that it's about apprenticeship. As I said earlier, the teenage bedroom doesn't require focus or discipline, yet the master’s study does. So you need to learn those skills at some point. And getting involved in the sort of "ecology of talent" discussed above can help you do that.

When you become part of a scene, you have to learn to meet its standards. This is somewhat true of any social group, but it's particularly true of the sort of milieu that Eno has in mind. To be a constituent part of scenius, not merely an onlooker, you need to be able to hold your own. This means absorbing ideals and developing skills that other members view as crucial. It means learning how to impress and win over your peers. Here, unlike in the teenage bedroom, you are learning and creating in accordance with an external model, as opposed to being lead entirely by your own whims. So “apprentice” seems like an apt term for someone at this stage. An apprentice to the scene.

For an example of what I'm talking about, consider this youtube commenter's take on early Afx:

The qualitative judgements of the early and later work here aren't important. What is important is the observation that before Aphex became a full on auteur, he just another kid learning how to DJ and make tracks he could play in a rave. A member of the scene, rather than standing apart from it. If you only knew Aphex as "that one electronic music super genius who gets namechecked by indie rock musicians" (like I did when I first saw this comment years ago), this interpretation of his artistic development would surprise you. The way he's talked about in the indie kid sphere could merit an entire post in itself--but suffice to say that you do not get descriptions like: "one of thousands of artists", "nothing special at the time", or "he was good but so were many others". You get this image of Aphex as a lone eccentric--but there was a time when he was on more or less the same page as everyone else.

Together, the teenage bedroom and scenius prepare you for the master's study. One does not sequentially follow the other, since these two stages don't build on each other so much as provide complementary skills. If you skip the teenage bedroom stage, you'll know how to imitate and impress with your work--but not how to extrapolate creatively beyond what others around you are doing at the moment. And if you skip the scenius stage, you won't learn how to make anything worthwhile at all.

But one question remains: once you're part of a community where you're surrounded by energetic, creative, generally inspiring people, why would you ever leave it behind for the comparative loneliness of the master's study? That's what we'll be thinking about in the next post.